This serves as example of theBandwagon effects, not only in the marketplace, but also in the realm of the politics of environmentalism.

Earth Hour advocates avoid explaining the cost benefit tradeoffs between their populist pseudo-environmental interests (which are principally based on highly flawed computer simulations*) and the economic and social value of electricity to humanity.

They fail to take into account that “electricity is the backbone of modern life”. On the other hand, they elude discussing the costs of their themes from which life without electricity equals poverty and death.

Electricity has given humanity huge benefits. Almost 3 billion people still burn dung, twigs, and other traditional fuels indoors to cook and keep warm, generating noxious fumes that kill an estimated 2 million people each year, mostly women and children. Likewise, just 100 years ago, the average American family spent six hours each week during cold months shoveling six tons of coal into the furnace (not to mention cleaning the coal dust from carpets, furniture, curtains, and bedclothes). In the developed world today, electric stoves and heaters have banished indoor air pollution.

Similarly, electricity has allowed us to mechanize much of our world, ending most backbreaking work. The washing machine liberated women from spending endless hours carrying water and beating clothing on scrub boards. The refrigerator made it possible for almost everyone to eat more fruits and vegetables, and to stop eating rotten food, which is the main reason why the most prevalent cancer for men in the United States in 1930, stomach cancer, is the least prevalent now.

Electricity has allowed us to irrigate fields and synthesize fertilizer from air. The light that it powers has enabled us to have active, productive lives past sunset. The electricity that people in rich countries consume is, on average, equivalent to the energy of 56 servants helping them. Even people in Sub-Saharan Africa have electricity equivalent to about three servants. They need more of it, not less.

This is relevant not only for the world’s poor. Because of rising energy prices from green subsidies, 800,000 German households can no longer pay their electricity bills. In the United Kingdom, there are now more than 5 million fuel-poor people, and the country’s electricity regulator now publicly worries that environmental targets could lead to blackouts in less than nine months.

Today, we produce only a small fraction of the energy that we need from solar and wind—0.7 percent from wind and just 0.1 percent from solar. These technologies currently are too expensive. They are also unreliable (we still have no idea what to do when the wind is not blowing). Even with optimistic assumptions, the International Energy Agency estimates that, by 2035, we will produce just 2.4 percent of our energy from wind and 0.8 percent from solar.

To green the world’s energy, we should abandon the old-fashioned policy of subsidizing unreliable solar and wind—a policy that has failed for 20 years, and that will fail for the next 22. Instead, we should focus on inventing new, more efficient green technologies to outcompete fossil fuels.

If we really want a sustainable future for all of humanity and our planet, we shouldn’t plunge ourselves back into darkness. Tackling climate change by turning off the lights and eating dinner by candlelight smacks of the “let them eat cake” approach to the world’s problems that appeals only to well-electrified, comfortable elites.

So we can’t discount of the "conspiracy theory" where one of the other possible subsidiary reasons for the massive printing of money by central banks could have been meant as subsidies forgreen energy via the pushing up or inflating prices of fossil fuels, which should make "unreliable" "inefficient" and "costly" green energy "competitive".

Unfortunately, markets know better. The free-market based Shale energy revolution has been proving to be the likely “environmental friendly” alternative more than the politically blessed “green energy” that has been founded on disinformation.

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About Me

About Me 2.0

Trade the Philippine stock market.

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I am a licensed agent and trader-analyst for MDR Securities

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Favorite Quotes

Favorite quotes:

Everything that happens in the social world in our time is the result of ideas. Good things and bad things. What is needed is to fight bad ideas. We must fight all that we dislike in public life. We must substitute better ideas for wrong ideas. We must refute the doctrines that promote union violence. We must oppose the confiscation of property, the control of prices, inflation, and all those evils from which we suffer.-Ludwig von Mises

Society lives and acts only in individuals; it is nothing more than a certain attitude on their part. Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of everyone hang on the result. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the great historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our epoch has plunged us. Ludwig von Mises

It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a "dismal science." But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.

Murray N. Rothbard

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design Friedrich von Hayek

When goods don't cross borders, armies will- Frederic Bastiat

If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.- Confucius

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win- Mahatma Gandhi (misattributed) original-Nicholas Klein